Add it up: Web-survey company QuestionPro acquires PollBob

QuestionPro, a web-survey and market-research company, has acquired PollBob, a small startup with a website and iPhone app for community polling.

The tie-up will give QuestionPro a toehold in the growing market for mobile polling applications. PollBob says that in the two years since its founding, it has attracted more than 350,000 users who have shared their opinions via polls more than 3 million times. About 270,000 of those users came via its January acquisition of Misterpoll, an under-the-radar company that was founded in 1998 and had never taken outside funding.

PollBob has just two employees, cofounders Zach Kupperman and Ben Jacobson (right), and had raised a “six figure” seed round from unspecified angel investors, according to Kupperman. It is based in New Orleans and is a graduate of the New Orleans-based startup accelerator The Idea Village.

“One of the big things we are doing with PollBob is to make it as engaging, social, and exciting as possible,” Kupperman told VentureBeat earlier this year. “Users can see polls by location and see the results roll in in real time.” That’s in contrast to Facebook’s built-in polling tools, which he characterized as “boring and not exciting in the least.”

“This is our entry into the social polling space,” said QuestionPro chief executive Vivek Bhaskaran in an email to VentureBeat. “Combined, we think we can compete with the likes of Google Consumer Surveys. The combined offering can leverage the social infrastructure that PollBob has developed along with the B2B focus QuestionPro has.”

Other competitors in the online polling market include SurveyMonkey, Vizu, PollDaddy, Twiigs, and many other, smaller companies.

“Zach and Ben have done a great job building this cutting-edge product, and we look forward to having Ben [Jacobson] join our team,” Bhaskaran said in a prepared statement. “He is a huge asset, and our customers will benefit tremendously from the capabilities this iPhone/web app has to offer, and we couldn’t be more excited about the acquisition.”

Jacobson will join QuestionPro, but Kupperman will not be staying on after the acquisition.

Founded in 2002, QuestionPro is the older, larger company. It now claims 2.5 million clients in 40 countries, including such giants as Microsoft, Honeywell, Motorola, and Safeway, charging rates from $12.50 to $99 per month for single-user licenses. It does about 300,000 to 400,000 surveys per day, according to Bhaskaran. QuestionPro has not taken any funding and is “very, very profitable,” Bhaskaran said. It was named to the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing private companies in 2009.